Bush & GOP Congress Letting America Down On Homeland Security

Meanwhile our cities, ports and borders are not receiving the financial support required to meet Homeland Security needs. Key cities have been forced to cut back First Responders (police and firemen). This is a travesty concerning leadership under Bush.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Homeland Security Goes Begging

Congress has a critical role in protecting the nation from terrorists by exercising careful scrutiny of homeland security programs. But so far, the House and Senate have been contributing to the problem rather than the solutions, distracting antiterrorism efforts by forcing officials to report to dozens of competing, power-hungry committees. The independent 9/11 commission cried out for an end to this "dysfunctional" system. Its solution was clean and obvious: create a single streamlined homeland security committee in each house, with both budget power and responsibility for oversight. Yet no national priority has been more shamefully subject to evasion by a truculent Congress ensconced in the traditions of turf battles.

Currently, the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security report to more than 80 committees and subcommittees in the House and Senate, each with a zealously guarded slice of the budget for securing the nation against terrorists. There is no one in Congress with the power or the responsibility to make sure the secretary of homeland security has the manpower and money he needs and to hold him accountable for the department's performance. Like the 9/11 panel, any average American could have seen the answer.

But not Congress. In its latest evasion, the House Republican leadership this week announced, with great fanfare, that it was granting "permanent" status to the existing House Select Committee on Homeland Security. All that was lacking was jurisdiction over homeland security budgeting, spending or performance.

Besides leaving the committee squarely in limbo, Speaker Dennis Hastert appeased powerful rival chairmen who were already sniping away at the homeland panel, which has spent the last two years scrambling for survival and office space. The committee's Republican chairman, Christopher Cox of California, can look forward to an inch-by-inch struggle for jurisdiction in arcane debates in the parliamentarian's office as his rivals - the ranking committee "bulls" of the Judiciary, Energy and Transportation Committees - invoke historical precedence over the newcomer.

Even as the new permanent homeland panel was proclaimed, rivals already conspired to deprive it of the jurisdiction for overseeing such basic essentials as the Coast Guard, border entries and cybersecurity threats to the country's electric power grids and other vulnerable infrastructures.

"This is the speaker's committee," says Mr. Cox, expecting help from on high. But even for an old wrestling coach like the speaker, refereeing the looming food fights over oversight and appropriations is no way to see that the people get proper vigilance and protection from their government.

Comparable cosmetic changes have been loftily proclaimed for the Senate committee system, but the same blur of jurisdiction, power jockeying and eventual inertia can be expected to continue. Three years after the 9/11 attacks, House leaders dared to defend their system in Orwellian terms as "purposeful redundancy" and a "competition of ideas." The bulls of Congress should only guard the nation this zealously.